The most male and female reasons to end up hospital 🚑

The first post I wrote for this blog was about people being injured by dogsSpecifically, how much of it goes on, and what matters a lot,

We can measure this reasonably well in England, because the Health Service publishes annual data for admitted to hospital Showing who was admitted For,

This often includes not only the physical condition that requires treatment, but also the event that caused the condition in the first place. So in other words, not just tissue damage to one’s hand, but the dog bite story behind it.

These second-order causes of entry – known as “external causes” – cover a whole world of terrible accidents that I looked at last time. The data also records whether the patient was male or female, so I wondered whether most men And most female There may be external reasons.

To cut to the chase, they’re here.

When I started the crunching that produced these numbers, I had no idea what I’d find. Had I done so, it would have been obvious that pregnancy would have topped the charts on the female side.

But I don’t think I could have imagined what a massive document I was compiling of male and female stereotypes. To me, the above chart basically says that violence, physical labour, sports and machines are the most commonly male ways to end up in hospital, while pregnancy, beauty and animals and mental health are the most commonly female.

I have to choose my words carefully, because I need to emphasize one thing: These are not the most common reasons for hospitalization for men and womenthey are the most generally male And usually female,

So only about 400 men go to hospital each year across England after falling from scaffolding. But that reason is at the top of the chart because it is the reason for admission that is the most male-dominated – just as various pregnancy-related reasons are the most female-dominated. (To give a real sense of scale, I’ve put the total number of admissions in the right-hand column.)

In practice, my guess is that these reasons are things that men or women do more often, or do more dangerously.

A few small points: I’ve excluded all outliers with fewer than 1,000 admissions over the past three years, so everything you see here happens at least fairly frequently, and amounts to a reasonable sample. I have also excluded some entries (less than half a percent) that are classified “gender unknown.”

there are some external reasons very long winding namesSo I have made them as simple as possible. “Agents act primarily on smooth and skeletal muscles and the respiratory system” is particularly ignorant, although I suspect it may have something to do with Botox.

Over the next few days I plan to upload all the data into a searchable table (if I can make it work) so you can search it in other ways too.

UPDATE: You can now find the data in This follow up post,